Gandhi & Churchill (62 page)

Meanwhile on November 13, 1930, the Round Table Conference began in London. Sixteen British and fifty-six Indian delegates (including sixteen Muslims and sixteen from the princely states) tried to hash out the details of devolving power in a great empire. Hashing out the fate of the Habsburg Empire after World War I, with Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Slovenians, and Germans all clamoring for self-determination, proved simple by comparison. In this case, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Bengalis, Punjabis, Parsis, Anglo-Indian Eurasians, and representatives of the untouchables or what was coming to be called the Depressed Classes, not to mention powerful Hindu religious parties like the Mahasabha, were all fighting for a voice within a
single
state—and a decisive voice at that.

As with most such conferences, the delegates soon found a slogan instead of a solution. That slogan was “an All India Federation.” What it would look like, no one could guess. But it soon emerged as the “dominant principle” for the entire nine weeks of discussion.
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The government in India and the British delegates liked the idea of an Indian federation, because it offered a way to preserve the role for a viceroy as an executive figure with “reserve powers.” It certainly seemed preferable to a majority-rule democratic India, which might elect an Indian legislature ready to demand full powers, including power over the army.

Indian delegates were equally enthusiastic. T. B. Sapru was staking his entire political career on getting a federation scheme approved. Jinnah and other Muslims indicated they might agree to one. Even India’s princes, who were supposed to be a great stumbling block to any constitutional changes, endorsed it with minor qualifications.

Churchill was “in the depths of gloom,” Baldwin gleefully wrote, as the conference failed to collapse and the delegates seemed ready to make progress. But the whole exercise was a waste of time, since no Congress delegation—and no Gandhi—was present. As Gandhi himself put it, it was
Hamlet
without the prince. For that reason alone the Mahatma could be expected to oppose any formula that left out the Indian National Congress as the main representative of the Indian people, or any “All-India Federation” that left British power largely intact. He was hardly alone. The protests continuing across India spoke volumes on where their future lay. Even before the month of November was out, the two chief deal-makers, Jinnah and Sapru, “found themselves spurned by many of their respective co-religionists.”
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Churchill and his supporters weighed in from the other side. On December 11 the India Empire Society held its first major public meeting, at Cannon Street. Winston was the principal speaker.

A sea of faces watched as the portly, balding figure in a black suit and bow tie strode to the microphone to pronounce sentence on a process that was in fact already DOA. “From many quarters we hear statements that opinion in India has advanced with violent speed,” he said. “Full Dominion Status with the right to secede from the British Empire” is being clamored for on all sides.

However, he warned, “no agreement reached at the [Round Table] Conference will be binding” morally or legally, on Parliament. That body, and that body alone, would have final say on the future of India. And “the British nation has we believe no intention whatever of relinquishing effectual control of Indian life and progress.”
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As the thunderous applause died, Winston defiantly plunged on. “So much for the facts in England! What are the facts in India?” India had not changed since his father’s time, he told his audience. The Western-educated elite who aspired to power there bore “no relation whatever to the life and thought of India”: its faceless poor, its sixty million untouchables, its Muslim minority who would be left to the mercies of a “Hindu despotism supplied by an army of European mercenaries”—a reference to an offhand remark by Gandhi that the one service whites might still offer a free India would be to train and equip its army.
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To reinforce his point, Churchill even quoted his father, saying that the British Raj served as “a sheet of oil spread out over and keeping free from storms a vast and profound ocean of humanity.” However, if “the British Raj is to be replaced by the Gandhi Raj,” then rulers of the native states must expect to be stripped of their powers; Muslims and untouchables of their rights; and Indian police and soldiers of any support from the new government.
¹¹

Then Churchill brought the cheering throng to his central point. “If Gandhi had been arrested and tried as soon as he broke the law” if the Lahore Congress, where the Union Jack had been burned, had been broken up and its leaders deported; then three-quarters of the distress now sweeping India could have avoided. Instead, “the shame is that our moral and intellectual guidance should have not been exerted as firmly as our material power.” Weakness at the center and “the defeatist tendency of our present politics” had encouraged Gandhi and others to think the British were leaving.

Now Parliament had to make clear its intention to “guide the destinies of the Indian people in faithful loyalty to Indian interest,” not to the demands of the political class. “The bold experiment” of Montagu and his reforms, and Irwin’s efforts at compromise, had failed. The past ten years, Churchill asserted, “have been years of failure.” It was time for Parliament to reclaim its “right and power to restrict Indian constitutional liberties” until new “more intimate, more representative organisms of self-government” had taken root.
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How that would happen, Churchill did not specify. But he did conclude with a dire prediction. “The truth is Gandhi-ism and all it stands for will, sooner or later, have to be grappled with and crushed,” he declared. “It is no use trying to satisfy a tiger by feeding him cat’s meat. The sooner this is realized,” the better. The alternative was to accept the downfall of the British Empire:

That great organism would pass at a stroke out of life into history. From such a catastrophe there could be no recovery…The race and nation which have achieved so many prodigies and have faithfully discharged so many difficult tasks…will [have fallen] a victim to their own lack of self-confidence and moral strength.
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The speech received widespread coverage in the media, much of it critical. The
Times
of London’s editor Geoffrey Dawson (who had met with and been impressed by Gandhi) deplored Churchill’s attack on the search “for a solution of the most difficult and dangerous situation which confronts the British Empire.” Churchill’s retrograde views, Dawson noted, still strongly reflected his views as a young officer in India in
My Early Life
. “The omniscient subaltern of 1896 is not, after all, so very far removed from the statesman who has nothing to learn in 1930.”
¹⁴

Lord Irwin blasted the speech as “monstrous” and speculated on whether Winston was “rather out of heart with politics altogether…with the result that he is rather mad-dogging.” He warned that “the day is past when you make nations live in vacuums…[and] when Winston’s possessive instinct can be applied to Empires and the like.” Practicing Churchill’s kind of imperialism was like trying to “fly a balloon that won’t hold gas…The thing just won’t work.”
¹⁵

Perhaps, but Winston and the hard-liners whom Lord Irwin and Dawson dismissed as superannuated Colonel Blimps were moving on to another mass meeting in Manchester. On December 24 Sir Malcolm Hailey warned Irwin that “the influence of Mr. Winston Churchill was strong” in local Tory circles and growing. Stanley Baldwin, he worried, might be underestimating his ability to carry the party with him. Certainly many concurred with former Governor-General of Bombay Lord Sydenham, who loved Churchill’s speech and told him the collapse of the Round Table Conference would be the best possible outcome for Britain. Indeed, any federation scheme “would split India to pieces” and by encouraging that kind of thinking, Sydenham said, the government “is playing a very dangerous game.”
¹⁶

But the hard-liners’ outrage, and Churchill’s, was nothing compared to their fury when they learned that Lord Irwin had not only released Gandhi from jail but struck a personal deal with the Mahatma himself.

New Year’s Day 1931 broke clear and bright over India. Virtually nothing had changed since the previous summer. Gandhi was still in prison, saying nothing; so were thousands of his followers. The streets of Bombay and other major cities were tranquil but deserted. The failure of the London Round Table Conference had triggered no great surprise or commotion and had done nothing to dispel the sullen atmosphere. It was Lord Irwin, and Lord Irwin alone, who decided to break the impasse, first by setting Gandhi free and then, six weeks later, by agreeing to meet with him at Viceroy House.

Here as usual in Gandhi’s career, historical truth and popular legend stand very far apart. Books and films portray Gandhi’s meeting with Irwin as a stupendous, even unique event and a singular triumph for Gandhi. The truth was that Gandhi had met several viceroys before, including Irwin. Certainly Irwin seemed different. When the viceroy ordered Gandhi’s release from Yeravda on January 26, 1931, which Irwin made clear was not an act of surrender but a gesture of goodwill to reopen negotiations, Gandhi was personally touched.

But Gandhi had dealt with cunning European negotiators previously, including General Smuts. He may have sensed that Lord Irwin was a man with principles but no convictions; a man whose sensitive and intelligent gifts were unaccompanied by any positive agenda. He was, in historian Alan Taylor’s words, “fertile with negations” and content to let others take the lead, whether at Viceroy House in 1931 or at Berchtesgaden in 1938.
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Irwin was the classic product of a ruling class that had lost faith in itself. Gandhi the barrister grasped that this was a man who could be pushed in the direction he wanted.

Another truth was that Gandhi himself was under pressure from his supporters to cut a deal. After the unprecedented success of 1930, the civil disobedience campaign was showing signs of losing momentum. Except in Gujarat, the United Provinces, and Bihar, it had been fading since October.
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The day after his release Gandhi met with Patel and his business friends in Bombay, who gave him an earful about their business woes thanks to the boycott. He heard the same complaints from supporters in Ahmedabad.
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Jawaharlal Nehru, also released on the twenty-sixth, and Nehru’s ailing father Motilal, both urged Gandhi to remain firm. Gandhi admitted that his inner voice offered no guidance on what to do, but the Bania lawyer sensed the time was ripe for moving forward, not standing still.

On February 7 he sent a letter to Irwin asking for a meeting: “I would like to meet not so much the viceroy of India as the man in you.” Irwin agreed, and at half past two on February 17, 1931, the historic meeting took place. At six foot five, Lord Irwin stood almost a full twelve inches taller than his guest, who arrived in his usual dhoti and cloak, looking “small, wizened, rather emaciated, no front teeth,” Irwin told King George V later. Gandhi cut a very strange figure in the splendid marble halls of the palace. “And yet,” Irwin added, “you cannot help feeling the force of character behind the sharp little eyes and immensely active and acutely working mind.”
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Srinivasa Sastri had told Irwin that “nothing is impossible” in dealing with Gandhi as long as one hit the right note.
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As an educated devout Christian, Irwin shared Gandhi’s spiritual side; he was also deeply sympathetic with India’s nationalist aspirations. At least at a personal level, the two hit it off. As Gandhi left following their first discussion, Irwin saw him to the door and said, “Good night, Mr. Gandhi, and my prayers go with you.”
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It was a graceful personal gesture that Gandhi never forgot.

But striking a final deal required hard bargaining, which took almost two weeks. Gandhi stayed in Delhi at his friend Ansari’s house. He met regularly with Irwin’s Indian supporters, Sapru, Jayakar, and Sastri. Sapru in particular was desperate to make the negotiations work. The Round Table Conference had blown up in his face as soon as it adjourned on January 13, even while Prime Minister MacDonald was promising responsible government for India. The detonator had been the “communal question,” a euphemism for Hindu-Muslim enmity. Sapru returned to India determined to stave off the collapse of all his hopes. He and other Liberals pushed Gandhi hard to find an “honorable settlement,” which meant one that Irwin could sell to his party and his superiors in London.
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The final result, the so-called Gandhi-Irwin pact, was announced on March 5, 1931. It was hardly a breakthrough; at least one historian has described it an anticlimax. Gandhi agreed to suspend all civil disobedience in exchange for the release of all prisoners, even though village officers who had resigned were to return only if their offices had not been filled. Gandhi also agreed to attend the next Round Table Conference, without insisting on Congress’s role as the leading representative. He also dropped his call for investigation of cases of police brutality during the salt satyagraha. Most ironic of all, the government’s salt monopoly and salt tax were left intact (although the government did concede that people in coastal areas could gather their own for personal use).

Gandhians around the country were stunned. They had fought hard, gone to jail, and risked everything for one goal: independence. But the agreement said nothing about independence, let alone Purana Swaraj. Far from feeling triumphant, they felt, in Jawaharlal Nehru’s words, “a great emptiness as of something precious gone, almost beyond recall.” After all the demonstrations and struggle, some feared that Gandhi had lost his way and that, like the Moderates, he was letting the British set the pace for the Long March to Independence.